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Silly Season Silliness

Steve Russell
4 min readSep 7, 2020

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Graphic from Pixabay.

Labor Day is here, and with it the traditional starting bell of Silly Season.

In this cycle, though, Donald John Trump has been running for reelection since the day of his inaugural. Whether this is because he lost the popular vote or just because he’s a guy with small hands, I am not informed.

The latter reason would be aggravated by comparison to Barack Obama’s first inaugural in 2009. Most differences, it seems to me, can easily be attributed to Obama being the first black president of this young nation. His inaugural, therefore, carries more historical significance than the typical swearing in.

Obama did Trump’s ego no good when he went out and raised the record sum of $53 million to pay for the parts of the festivities not picked up by other contributors or the taxpayers. The biggest bill the taxpayers normally have to eat is for security, always a concern in this time when one path to fame is thought to be killing a famous person…but by the time of the inaugural, the Secret Service had already seen Obama collecting record numbers of death threats.

The fundraising for the party puzzles some people when they are informed that the entertainers normally do not get paid for performing. Whether this applies to the last piccolo player in the back of the orchestra pit, I don’t…

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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